In April 2021, the Bluetooth blunder all romance readers fear most happened to me in while I was in the hospital recovering from a preventative mastectomy.
With COVID-19 vaccines still difficult to come by, I spent most of my hospital stay alone in a dimly lit room, plowing through the array of romance audiobooks that I had downloaded onto my iPhone.While the nurse was checking the status of my surgical drains, my traitorous phone disconnected from my Bluetooth headphones and amplified my audiobook throughout the room. Though not a steamy scene, it was a romantic scene. Characters were sharing furtive glances, imagining what would happen if they closed the distance between them and shared a kiss. It certainly wasn’t a moment I would’ve chosen to play on speaker.
“Fun! A book,” my nurse said, completely unruffled. She was a total pro. Meanwhile, I rained apologies all over her as I fumbled with my phone.
Once she was gone, I searched my bed for my rogue earbud, careful to avoid movements that sent searing pains through my chest. Then, the voice beside me asked, “What book was that?”
Those were the first words exchanged with my roommate behind the curtain. Before that, she’d merely been the person responsible for the occasional whir of a bed raising and lowering on the other side of the pink curtain separating us. I rattled off all the books I’d downloaded for my hospital stay: “Take a Hint, Dani Brown,” by Talia Hibbert, “You Deserve Each Other” by Sarah Hogle, and “The Happy Ever After Playlist” by Abby Jimenez. “Oh, those are on my list,” she said. “I read romance, too.”
Like so many women, I read romance novels in 2020. I mean dozens. Heaps. I had romance coming out of my ears. I simply couldn’t get enough of their happy endings and incendiary arm grazes replete with yearning. I only had time for novels where good things happened to good people and heroines spoke freely about their bodies and their sexualities. Unlike most women, however, I wasn’t only reading romance during the early days of COVID for a mental vacation from the indignities of driving to a far-flung Target in search of single-ply toilet paper based on a questionable NextDoor tip. (Though that was certainly a bonus). I was reading romance to soothe my heart and mind as I prepared for a preventative double mastectomy and weighed the pros and cons of sparing my nipples.
Being a carrier of the BRCA 1 genetic mutation puts me at a significantly higher risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer in my lifetime. Back in 2020, all tests indicated that I was healthy and cancer free. Still, I couldn’t shake the “what if.” Namely: What if I waited too long and missed my chance at a cancer-free life? So, on the advice of my doctors, I began the overwhelming process of planning my double mastectomy.
Redesigning your own breasts within the (decidedly unsexy) bounds of medical science is an odd task. While so many people who undergo this procedure have little choice in the matter, I was choosing everything: the date, the material, the size and the shape of my new, artificial breasts. I was even choosing whether to lose or keep my nipples, a decision that comes with some potential medical risks. Turns out that if you are planning a prophylactic mastectomy, the world is your oyster — but only if you enjoy oysters as I do, which is to say, you don’t at all and think they look a bit grisly set on ice in the middle of a picnic table.
Each of these decisions is deeply personal, and therefore, deeply isolating. A person’s relationship to their breasts and their component parts isn’t exactly virtual happy-hour fodder. (Again, this was early 2020, when we still attended gender reveal parties via Zoom, and I would slip conversational nipples into small talk while the party waited in gallery view for the appearance of a blue or pink cupcake.) So, as I fixated on the pros and cons of nipples while faced with a life without physical sensation in my breasts, I turned to the only women I knew who were equally as eager to discuss their breasts: women in romance novels.
While the romance genre varies widely in its depictions of sex — from the mere implication of intimacy to explicit on-page descriptions — it is mostly consistent in the ways it centers women’s physical experience of sexual attraction and desire. I’ve read countless descriptions of women noting specific states of nipple arousal upon meeting the strapping hero or striking heroine — from perky to pinched, purpled to pebbled, puckered to even plumped. Whereas most women don’t pay close attention to the pair of nipples on their chest, the nipples of romantic fiction all seem to have lives of their own — in part, because authors rarely shy away from depicting their heroine’s physical experience of attraction. As a result, their characters feel empowered by their sexuality, not embarrassed of it, and they can embrace it boldly and without shame.
In reading about these women, whose struggles, zip codes and sometimes charmingly impractical day jobs weren’t like my own, I reveled in how they were each boldly taking control of their sexuality and being rewarded for it. They were looking for love, yes, but they were also searching for identity and self-acceptance. These women were teaching themselves that love was a worthwhile pursuit and that they were worthy recipients of it, exactly as they were.
After my diagnosis, I’d begun to resent my breasts. I found myself slumping in my chair and gained an affinity for sleeveless summer turtlenecks. I looked at them in the mirror with anger and dread. They were my enemy. And though I was mounting a preemptive attack, I blamed them for forcing my hand. But reading romance — a genre brimming with optimism and frank discussions of women’s bodies, self-love, and pleasure — gave me permission to see my breasts as more than ticking time bombs. They gave me the language I needed to discuss my own relationship with my body and what I was afraid of losing: beauty, sensuality and self-confidence.
